Operations Manager 2007 R2 Available for Trial

Microsoft on Thursday issued an "evaluation edition" of its System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 product.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 is a datacenter monitoring solution that shows the overall state and performance of an IT system. The application has reached the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) stage of development, which is the stage before final product release, Microsoft announced last week.

This evaluation edition is a fully baked trial version, known as build 7221. It can be accessed at the Microsoft Download Center here. Microsoft plans to deliver the final product on July 1 of this year.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 is part of Microsoft's System Center product family and has its origins in Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000 and 2005 products. While you can't call it "MOM" anymore, there are other product differences. Operations Manager 2007 R2 focuses on monitoring the overall IT service, and not just on monitoring individual servers, according to Microsoft's white paper (PDF download). It also adds Active Directory integration and role-based security, among other features.

A key new feature to the R2 release is the ability of IT pros to monitor non-Microsoft operating systems and applications. Microsoft's white paper claims that Operations Manager 2007 R2 can now monitor "Windows, Linux and UNIX servers, as well as their workloads, all from a single console."

Microsoft added an integrated wizard for getting management packs. The R2 solution can also scale to monitor more than 1,000 URLs, according to the white paper.

Also released on Thursday was Service Level Dashboard 2.0 for System Center Operations Manager, which can be downloaded here. This application provides a dashboard for monitoring the service levels of various line-of-business applications. New features in Service Level Dashboard 2.0 include data latency improvements, role-based authentication and a new service level tracking feature, among others.

TechNet subscribers can try out various Microsoft System Center products via Microsoft's virtual labs, which can be accessed here. Microsoft plans to update the virtual labs with the Operations Manager 2007 R2 RTM bits some time next month.

Microsoft on Monday announced it has opened up a new TechNet forum for Operations Manager users, which can be accessed here.